“It is not the time for fear and cowardice, like with the Chicago Teachers Union. It is the time for resilience and courage.”
Preface: School board meetings are about the surest cure to insomnia one can encounter, in my experience. And the vagaries of school district politics have always seemed to me beneath noticing or caring about. So my teaching career has proceeded for decades. But the rise of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 and staffing pressures on local schools, in addition to teacher labor union militancy and calls for “sick outs” by educators wanting to return to distance learning, prompted me to take the unusual step of writing the following open letter to my superintendent, the members of our school board, and the local leader of the teachers union.
Two letters to the school board in 28 years?
That is almost two more than I ever have wanted to write. It is out of character for me.
But I felt the need to speak up, lest the teachers who are in favor of closing the schools be the only ones speaking out.
Hopefully this will be the last time the school board or superintendent hears from me. I have only another six or so years left on the job.
We shall see.
At any rate, esteemed reader, here is the letter:
January 7, 2022
Dear Superintendent Rice:
My name is Richard Geib, and I’m a teacher at Foothill Technology High School. This is my 22nd year at that school, which I helped to start back in 2000.
I am writing to urge you to please keep the Ventura schools open in this latest surge fueled by the Omicron variant of COVID-19.
At the beginning of this academic year many of my high school students described how depressed they had become when the schools were closed in 2020, and they were TERRIFIED it could happen again this year. “No,” I told them, reiterating what Principal Russell Gibbs had told us teachers, “School is back to normal — just with masks. No more distance learning!” And so it has been for almost an entire semester of in-person learning at Foothill Tech. No more “groundhog day” nightmare isolation month-after-month in quarantine. No longer are students stuck at home climbing the walls and driving their parents crazy. Students are back in school learning with their peers in the classroom and eating lunch with their friends in the quad. Teachers teach content and students sweat to write essays. Since August 2021 the education business is re-opened. Foothill Technology High School is BACK.
After school being closed for so long, it feels good. The weary exhaustion which comes from completing almost half a regular school year is welcome.
But I see the Chicago Teachers Union going on strike because of fears for their personal safety in this latest surge. Some school districts are also delaying a return to classes after the winter break. I have heard some Ventura Unified Education Association members express a desire to go remote again. Please don’t do that, Dr. Rice. Do not pull the rug out from underneath Ventura teachers and students.
It has been some 22 painful months since the SARS-CoV-2 virus arrived on the scene and disrupted our lives. Healthcare workers have put in long hours at work at considerable personal risk to themselves since the beginning of the pandemic. Same with fire and police personnel. Grocery clerks and warehouse workers have reported to work. I too am ready to do my job as a high school teacher. I am double vaccinated and boosted. I accept some risk to my health to be in a crowded classroom hour after hour; but the risk is acceptable, considering how much is at stake. If anyone is an “essential worker,” it should be the teacher. Please put some steel into your spine, Dr. Rice, and resist the Covid panickers and stay the course.
I have had numerous students out this week with Covid as the number of infected recently has surged. Sick teenagers might miss a week or two of high school while ill, but we teachers will work to catch them up when they return — and they won’t miss the whole quarter or semester — or an entire year. Adolescents are extremely unlikely to become severely ill or die from COVID-19. We can adapt and overcome. I myself might get sick with the virus and have to stay home and recover. But I’ll be back. We’ll work around it.
It is not the time for fear and cowardice, like with the Chicago Teachers Union. It is the time for resilience and courage.
I will be in my classroom every workday this winter and spring doing my best to help students to think critically and to learn deeply, Dr. Rice — if you keep the schools open. I promised my students school was in operation like in the days before Covid — and so it has been. Foothill Tech is BACK. Please don’t undue this by going remote again.
Thank you for taking the time to read my letter. I know a litany of responsibilities clamor for your attention.
Very Truly Yours,
Richard Geib
2 Comments
Jay Canini
In regards to boostered adults who are immunocompromised, with significant underlying lung disease, and/or those over 65 who still work in educational settings, should they start taking disability and/or be paid a stipend to work from home in some capacity?
As per the Guardian article “Donna Coleman died after Covid ran riot at Burnley College. Should it have been open?” (which occurred before vaccinations) much of the concern in regards to COVID and schools had to do with adults, who were more likely to end up with severe COVID than students. Now in 2022 most adults and almost all students can be easily protected with boosters. There may be a very small number of immunocompromised students and/or students significant underlying lung disease, so I think districts should find arrangements for them.
rjgeib
Dear Jay,
I talk in my posting about the pusillanimous Chicago Teachers Union, or other school districts moving to remote education.
But I would even more strongly criticize universities in the United States.
I don’t know, Jay. Maybe allow those small numbers of older and immunocompromised but vaccinated employees to work from home if they can, as you suggest. But if you are vaccinated you are most likely not going to die from COVID if you are infected. And you are going to be infected, sooner or later. So maybe you should choose to engage the wider world?
Or you can live like a monk in a cave in near total isolation indefinitely.
I have a good friend who had a kidney transplant and is immunocompromised. He is a social studies teacher in a Georgia high school. He is fully vaccinated and in front of his students each day. There is some risk involved, but he deals with it. That is his role in this pandemic. Working from home as a teacher delivering content over the Internet is a proven non-starter. It is much the same in universities with online learning.
Jay, college students need their professors. High school and elementary school students need their teachers. Athletes need their coaches and vice versa. Young people need their friends. The same all the way down the line. People need to be with other people face-to-face. Government policy during the pandemic has disrupted it all. A society already struggling with loneliness and isolation has gotten considerably worse.
Over the past two years in the name of disease mitigation we have voluntarily shut large segments of our society down, including universities and primary and secondary schools, and drastically hurt children and young adults in the name of protecting the elderly and the infirm from this virus.
Especially two years after it began, we need to learn to live with COVID-19. Reduce the risk where and how we can, and get on with life. Especially in the universities and schools where young people are so much more protected from illness.
Instead what we have is fear and cowardice, like at the University of California system – or at Stanford University where my nephew studies. They have gone back to remote learning, if temporarily, and we shall see if that extends. But college tuition, which has never been higher, won’t change to reflect diminished instruction. Or Princeton University, which was trying to limit any student from even leaving the areas immediately adjacent to campus in their COVID policy. Who do they think they are? Is that even legal? And with mostly healthy young adults on campus – all of whom are vaccinated – who have a tiny chance of getting seriously sick and dying from COVID, why are they still canceling in-person classes and moving to remote learning over the Internet (while still charging the same tuition)?
Fear. Cowardice. Madness.
The prizing of “safety” over every other consideration.
It is the same mindset which makes “safe rooms” for college students to retreat to while recovering from the “trauma” of hearing opinions or “microaggressions” which “trigger” and upset them. Students who are all too ready to denounce wrong–thinking folk, or to shrink the public space in the name of orthodoxy. Or a college which disinvites controversial speakers who might roil the volatile elements of the campus community and student body, in the hopes of avoiding conflict. Fear, safety.
This is another example of “overparenting” which makes it hard for young people today to embrace novelty, overcome challenges, become independent adults – in short, to grow up.
Instead we have a generation of young people stunted in their development with record levels of anxiety and depression. These COVID policies in the colleges just highlight trends which were present before the pandemic.
If I were a young person nowadays, I would do almost everything opposite to what officious university nanny-administrators and/or overbearing helicopter-parents tell me to do. I would refuse to be treated like a child who requires delicate treatment and special attention. I would announce to my elders I am capable of walking on my own two feet and making up my own mind, thank you very much.
Enough!
Eschew the fear, young people.
Don’t hold back.
Get vaccinated.
Embrace the world.
Live your life.
Go for it.